I have a few questions: should I make my time boxes and rest time boxes equal lengths, or should I change them? Also, what if I like 2 minute time boxes for resting? Should I not do them because you say I shouldn’t? Also if a I feel like stopping mid-timebox should I continue anyway or should I stop because I want to stop?

That should be all the questions I thought I should ask. I’m sure it shouldn’t be too much trouble for anyone to tell me how I should get started on this. Thanks.: )

When I get a few extra greenbacks I’ll be sure to buy some electronic book goodies from you. Keep up the interesting and inspiring words. I always like reminders that I’m not crazy in a bad way.

(autodidactism ftw)

Getting tired of breaks happens, but I’ve become quite skilled at not working at all for extended periods of time, and making procrastination the default; while I know work should be more interesting than a lifelong vacation, I still have difficulty getting started.

P.s., I don’t think rest is bad. You just need to rest while still ‘doing’ Japanese – TV is a favourite.

Basically, if it helps, add it; If it adds more stress than necessary, drop it (this includes deleting cards).

When your sentence deck gets around 7000, you have all sorts of ways of stressing yourself out. Ignoring it just inflames it more (makes them increase); so finding a good way to balance everything with medium-sized intervals throughout the day is possibly the best way.

Question for you: How do the timeboxes make you feel? No, that’s not a crazy psychoanalytic question…. What I mean is, if I know I will simply set another timebox when the current one finishes, I feel nothing about the time counting down. No pressure. 1 minute timebox? No problem, cause I have infinite 1 minute timeboxes if I need them. So it’s kind of like not using timeboxes at all, since they lose their motivational power if you can just set another one. This is mostly a problem with tasks that I MUST finish (i.e. something due the next day, or finishing ALL my reps), since there can’t be a time deadline (the deadline is “complete”). Any suggestions?

also: I’m learning cantonese and happily making strides thanks to you and SRS software. Would love if you shared some of those resources too sometimes. Thanks for sharing your insights!

Dr. Lazy,
What’s up with your cards? The other day I was doing some vocab cards taken from smart.fm and it was making me hate the process. It was too hard and boring. They were business terms made up of kanji compounds where I could barelyfigure out what the kanji were, didn’t know the readings of those characters, and didn’t understand why the Heisig keywords I knew made up the vocab word. After failing them a few times, I suspended them. I do not want to keep failing the same 100 cards and thus failing to get to the rest of the 2000 vocab words. Lazy, easy, fun, is the name of the game. So my question for you is, are your cards lazy, easy, and fun? Right now I’m using AnkiSRS for my Heisig/RTK kanji deck and its showing me all the cards with like 1.3 year intervals that I have never failed. It is pretty easy to do because the cards are easy. Maybe you should get your delete key handy and when you get a card that makes you want to hit “end session” delete the card instead.

I do know that I’ve knocked my normal timeboxes down from 60 to 30 and now down to 10 minutes; and with so much more bliss recently; that I highly recommend it. However, I believe this is a personal path you will have to find on your own; subscribing to 1 minute timeboxes from the get-go could cause ulcers… seriously.

Never make your timebox intervals short enough that they cause panic and/or stress, otherwise you’re defeating the purpose.